Measurement of position based on correlative function in self-movement

This paper describes an effective method to estimate a position of an automous vehicle equipped with a single CCD-camera along indoor passageways. Using the sequential image data from the self-movement of the vehicle, the position is estimated by integrating the approximated motion parameters. The detection of the yaw angle that is one of the motion parameter is difficult in general, e.g. slip or error for noise, therefore the different detection is presented, which is, without shaft encoders, based on a projection function for 2D-image data and a cross-correlation function so as to be robust for noise. The approximated geometric function to estimate the position is used to reduce the computational effort. To verify the effectiveness of the method, the analysis and the computational results are shown through the simulations. Furthermore, the experimental results by using the test vehicle for the real indoor passageway are shown.